Pages

Monday 4 March 2013

Priority for Donors

Last night, the following query was posted on the Philos-L mailing list:
In a recent book, "The Ethics of Transplants", Janet Radcliffe Richards proposes that organ donors should get preferential treatment on the donor waiting list compared to those who refuse to donate their organs. This seems to be to be a relatively commonsense, "anti-hypocrisy" measure. Indeed, it is so commonsense that I cannot help but feel that this proposal has been made elsewhere. Unfortunately, I have reached a dead-end in researching this idea; most discussion regarding hypocrisy in organ donation, sadly, revolves around organ selling.
Can someone point me in the direction of other bioethicists who have proposed a similar position regarding punishing those who refuse post-death organ donation?


I'm no expert on where this idea first came from, but I sent him a recent paper of mine from Bioethics which touches on the issue and has a couple of relevant references (in footnotes 21-22). Apparently, such a priority scheme already exists in Israel. An ethical analysis of this policy appeared in the journal Transplantation last year: here.

Needless to say, this is the kind of policy proposal that I'm very interested in exploring...

No comments:

Post a Comment